


Last Orders

by TheSummoningDark



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: M/M, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-11 01:01:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSummoningDark/pseuds/TheSummoningDark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Collected ficlets written for prompts on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for scottishwolves, who requested "mmm… how about Malcolm and one of Jamie’s kids? or maybe Malcolm and Jamie in their days working at a Scottish newspaper together" and got a mishmash of both. 
> 
> In which Jamie's missed work, and Malcolm is regretting chasing him up about why.

Over the course of their acquaintance he’s seen Jamie in various impressive states of disarray. This is including but not limited to: in the Western A&E at 4am being sewn up after being glassed in a barfight. Having narrowly evaded Strathclyde Police’s finest after being interrupted attempting to break into an MP’s house (all in the name of a story, of course). Apocalyptically hungover the day after Aberdeen beat Celtic on penalties in the 1990 cup final. So to say that the Jamie who has just answered the door of his pokey Partick flat is the most harried and dishevelled Malcolm has ever seen him is not a statement made lightly. He looks like he should have been buried days ago.

"The fuck happened to you?" Malcolm offers by way of greeting.  
"The fuck are you doing here?" Is Jamie’s equally courteous response.

The indignant response - the idle bastard hadn’t shown face at work, leaving Malcolm to slog through the bumf on that fucking Dryden health board case alone because their coworkers are to a man complete fucking oxygen thieves - is interrupted by a piercing wail from somewhere inside the flat. There’s a dull thump as Jamie’s forehead meets the doorframe. He mutters a series of curses, most of them directed at Malcolm, and disappears down the hallway, coughing. Choosing to interpret the fact that the door hasn’t been slammed in his face as an invitation, curiosity prompts Malcolm to follow.

He was aware in a nebulous sort of way that Jamie was married with children. Jamie had - in typically glaswegian fashion, like his father before him - produced children entirely too young and mostly by accident (Unlike his father before him, he’d managed to get all the way through hearing the sentence “I’m pregnant” without bolting). But that knowledge was apparently not sufficient preparation for the sight of Jamie with a whimpering infant perched on his hip and a sniffling toddler clinging to his free hand. It’s a surreal thing to witness. Not least of all because Jamie’s approach to this, unlike his approach to literally everything else, involves no swearing or violence whatsoever.

"So why are you here?" Jamie asks, distracted by sorting out his various offspring. The flat looks a little like a tornado tore through the kids’ aisle at Boots and deposited the contents in a car boot sale.  
"You never showed up for work."  
"I phoned in. This one-" He gives the older girl an affectionate cuff about the head. She sticks her tongue out at him and sneezes. "-brought the bloody plague home from nursery. We’re all down with it." He’s attempting to clear some of the various detritus from the coffee table one-handed; an unfinished mug is currently causing some difficulty. "The doctors’ve been fu- er, bloody useless, an’ I still need to-" He fumbles the mug, cold lemsip sloshing onto his sleeve, and gives a frustrated growl. "Oh for- here, hold this."

Before Malcolm can raise any objection a sticky and still fussing Eleanor Joanne MacDonald - named for a great-aunt and Jamie’s attempted confirmation saint, though he’s not sure why he knows that - is deposited in his arms. He stares. She stares damply back with the expression of wide-eyed disbelief common to all infants. She has her dad’s unnaturally blue eyes, which is vaguely disconcerting for reasons he can’t quite pin down.

At least she seems to have given up crying in favour of goggling at him. Cautiously he sits down on a relatively unobstructed patch of sofa, well clear of the sniffling three-year-old - Katherine Lorna, for both her grandmothers, _why does he know this_ \- who is regarding him from a nest of blankets with wary curiosity and the same bush-baby eyes as her father and sister. The sounds of purposeful clattering and occasional sneezes drift over from the direction of the kitchen as he carefully rearranges Ellie into a position where she seems unlikely to escape or get somehow damaged. She’s drooling gently; he closes his eyes and offers a silent prayer for the safety of his shirt.

The feeling of eyes on him intensifies tenfold, and he glances up to see Jamie in the doorway, regarding the scene before him with an odd expression on his face.

"What?" he says, suddenly feeling oddly defensive. Jamie shakes his head.  
"Nothing."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the one and only stackcats, who asked for "Because these two + fluff = hilarious: Jamie/Malcolm and some kind of romantic occasion when they both try and make an effort. An anniversary or Valentine’s Day or something" and instead got Jamie alarming and bewildering Malcolm by being unexpectedly sweet, which I am assured is close enough.
> 
> In which Jamie makes an effort, and Her Majesty's Government has other ideas.

The first warning sign is—

Well, the first warning sign is hard to pin down, since Jamie is powered by barely-suppressed fury and would be considered a walking warning sign by most sane people. Therefore acts and statements that would be cause for great alarm if observed in anyone else are relatively innocuous. There are a few odd little moments that in hindsight could have been considered to be the first warning sign. But the first truly out of character act, the one that finally sets alarm bells off in his head, is the dinner reservation.

From literally anyone else on the planet it would be a perfectly nice, innocent gesture. From Jamie it’s grounds for immediate suspicion and alarm. Jamie has a pathological hatred of fancy restaurants. If questioned about it he would - in the unlikely event that he chose to answer rather than advising the questioner to mind their own fucking business in creatively obscene and threatening terms - attribute this to the “pretentious middle-class wankstains” which frequent such establishments.

(This, while perfectly true, is not the real reason. Jamie has a deep-seated hatred of the idea of being waited on, nearly commeasurate with his hatred for Rangers FC, the conservative party, opera, and the town of Milton Keynes. It’s a stubborn remnant of the Red Clydeside sensibilities he was raised with.)

So this in mind, really it’s only fair that such a thing as a _dinner reservation_ sends Malcolm into a state of advanced paranoia. This is…very much not a thing that they do. Ever. Naturally his assumption is that some horrifying news is about to be broken to him in a safely public place where his powerful aversion to appearing in the tabloids will prevent him from making a scene.

It has to be that. They don’t ever do this. Jamie - and he says this with all the affection in the world, but it’s true - has all the sensitivity and romantic inclination of a serial killer. And Malcolm exists in a state of deep and permanent paranoia over the idea of some paparazzi fuck long-lensing them together and joining a few dots. No-one with any remotely normal understanding of the term would classify anything they’ve done in the past not quite five years as a da-

Five years. Just short of _exactly_ five years, actually.

It’s so ridiculous a possibility that he very nearly dismisses it out of hand, and he has to do some mental arithmetic to be sure he’s even right, but…yes, if you want to get technical about it, you could say that what could be considered their five year anniversary is coming up. If you were the sort of person who kept track of things like that.

Anyone else might have rejected it automatically; after all, it’s Jamie. But that’s the thing. It’s Jamie. Jamie, who spent the first several years of his career in Westminster spending every spare penny on train tickets to go up and see his girls at the weekends. Pulling some surprise like that out of thin air is exactly the sort of thing the wee mental case would do.

He considers the idea of a proper meal in a nice restaurant like fucking real people, and discovers that he doesn’t hate it.

Perhaps he can break his own rule on this one. Just once.

(As it happens, the reservations come and go unnoticed while Jamie growls threats half an inch from the Secretary of State for Defence’s face, and in the next office, Malcolm blackmails a senior BBC producer over the phone.

Instead dinner is a frankly disgusting takeaway on the way home at two in the morning; _happy anniversary, you sentimental wee twat_ Malcolm says with a smirk. Jamie calls him a cunt and throws a chip at him, but he can’t wipe the slightly manic grin from his face.

That might just be better.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For scottishwolves: I like to assume that [Jamie] is working somewhere else now, but he and Malcolm still harass each other by email and help each other out now and then because after all these years they literally _don’t know how to stop_.
> 
> In which old habits die hard.

After the first time, it becomes a habit.

The first time it’s because he’s in a corner and they’re running out of time, and half an hour before the six o’clock news is meant to air his pragmatism overcomes his pride and he shoots the backstabbing wee prick a terse, hurried text. _That smug fuck Kinnear at Channel 4, I know you’ve got dirt on him._

Five minutes later he gets the response, a picture attachment blurred by compression but still clear enough to do some damage.

The text just reads _you fucking owe me._

It’s the first time. It’s not the last. They trade dirt on near every journalist of any note in the entire fucking country, all the while dancing around the yawning chasm of conflict of interest. Fortunately shafting the opposition - now the government, backed by those weasel lib dem wankstains - remains a common goal of theirs whatever else may change.

It’s just like old times, being back in opposition together, even if they’re not working for the same party any more.

One day, he finds himself quietly disposing of a long-lensed photo of one of Jamie’s new political ‘masters’ in an extremely compromising position, and it finally dawns on him that he might just be in over his head. But then a few days later he gets a hurried email warning him of some sensitive information that’s been leaked to the _Independent_ , and he decides it’s probably for the best if he stops questioning it.

And then in far too short a span, everything goes to utter shit. The Levenson Inquiry has gone irretrievably tits up, Ollie Reeder - Ollie _fucking_ Reeder, the little sentient yeast infection - has taken over his fucking job, and he’s under fucking arrest. 

Perjury. What a fucking joke. If they banged up every bastard who lied through his fucking teeth in the name of politics, they’d have to take back Australia just for the fucking penal real estate.

On the first day of his trial, he gets a text from a blocked number.

It simply reads _fucking battle stations._


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> stackcats: "TTOI pirate AU"
> 
> In which Jamie is combative as ever, and Malcolm is grudgingly impressed.

Smoke spiraled lazily into the sky over the wreckage of the town. Raiding coastal settlements was a hit-and-miss sort of way of turning a profit. Generally the ones with anything worth taking were too well defended for a few ships to attack; while the smaller, less well defended ones, rarely had anything valuable enough to be worth the trouble of attacking. The town they’d just leveled, despite some optimism to the contrary, had turned out to be very much the latter.

Malcolm, a strategist by nature rather than a fighter, had come ashore once it was all over. He was met at the docks by the first mate of the _Dos Sacudidas_ (a ‘comandeered’ ship generally referred to as Dosac by her largely english-speaking crew). Glenn Cullen, a worn old hand whose glory days were long behind him, fell into step automatically as he reported.

"Little enough trouble, really, but more than we’d planned for. We lost about a dozen men, all told."  
"A dozen?" Malcolm rounded on him, glowering. "How the fuck did you manage that? There’s fuck all _here_. Did the goats put up a fucking fight?”  
"We ran into some, er- unexpected resistance."  
"What?"  
"You’d better come see."

He led the way to the mission, a low, solid building atop a hill behind the town. From the blood and bulletholes and occasional bodies, it was clear that this was where the fighting had been fiercest.

"This is where they holed up, then?"  
"Not they. He."

Malcolm didn’t have much use for the priesthood, generally. They were a shower of sanctimonious cunts, more interested in preaching hypocrisy while lining their pockets than getting off their overfed arses and actually doing anything useful. But if they had any more like the young man currently being dragged, struggling and cursing and leaving a trail of blood behind him, from the shot-up mission building…well, he might be persuaded to revise his opinion.

He bit Frankie and nearly broke loose in the ensuing struggle, only to ultimately receive a solid boot in the ribs and a brutal crack across the side of the head for his troubles. Malcolm watched, grudgingly impressed by his tenacity, even as he was hauled up to his knees and his hands bound roughly behind him, blood trickling down the side of his face from an ugly cut at his hairline. Even with the blood, his boyish features and huge blue eyes gave him an almost angelic appearance. At least until he opened his mouth.

"Shoot him in the back of the head and have done with it!" Someone called over a fresh burst of furious invective— from safely toward the back of the mob of spectators. Malcolm held up a hand to forestall any attempted agreement. "No."

He went to his knees in the bloodstained dust of the shattered town. Their prisoner, bloodied and still gasping for breath, raised his chin and met his eyes, all bared teeth and fearless defiance. Malcolm grinned like a shark.

"No," he repeated. "I’ve got a better idea."


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blame scottishwolves and stackcats and their enabaling and goddamn wee!Jamie photosets

The first time they meet, it's 4am in the Western Infirmary A&E, and a tired-looking nurse is putting the first of forty-seven stitches into a grinning Jamie's arm.

Well. If you want to get technical about it, they actually _met_ about an hour ago. But it's in the Western that Malcolm finally - and decades hence he'll deny this to his dying breath, but it's the truth - sobers up enough to give some actual consideration to the diminutive psychopath he's washed up in the A &E with.

Now it must be noted that at this hazy stage in the wee hours of the morning, Malcolm is not in fact one hundred percent sure of what's just happened. He remembers arriving at Volcano with some mates from uni not long after the pubs kicked out, already several pints (and a few wee white pills he should probably have questioned the provenance of more closely) down. The bouncers had eyed them suspiciously but let them through without challenge in the end. He's not entirely clear on how he subsequently ended up in the middle of a classic Glasgow barfight, all swearing and shattered glass, but presumably he must have done _something_ to merit the bruised (not cracked, the nurse assured him) ribs and what will be a truly magnificent blank eye.

He remembers being hauled off the the A&E. The moment he'll remember with crystal clarity years, decades later though, is the first good look he takes at Jamie. It's the eyes. Of course it fucking is. Those huge blue eyes, still strangely angelic even when - perhaps even _more_ so when - he's splattered with his own blood and grinning like a serial killer.

Other things leap out at him at the time, of course. The first thing that Malcolm, twenty-three years old and frankly off his tits, really notices on more closely examining his fellow combatant is that - to his mild surprise - he's wearing the armband ID that marks him as a bouncer rather than a random drunk. The second is that under the blood and bruises and manic grin, he looks all of twelve fucking years old.

"Were you even old enough to be in that fucking club?" he says.

"Fuck yourself," is the utterly unperturbed reply. "Didn't see you askin' for any ID when I was haulin' that big fucker off of you."

Over the years he'll come to learn that Jamie is never so unshakeable in his confidence as in the wake of one disaster or another. Maybe something about the nature of their relationship was set in stone there and then, in the fact that his first impression of Jamie is of the Jamie on a manic high after a good fight or fuck, buzzing with adrenaline and ready to take on the whole world and win. He'll wonder about that sometimes, in decades to come. If on some subconscious level part of him has always been wanting to see that again.

Later, dawn will be breaking pale pink and gold over the streets of Glasgow as they emerge from the A&E. Malcolm will wince as his cigarette catches on his split lip, squint up at the lightening sky, and offer one to his new friend.

(There will come a time, decades later, in the heat of the furious moment, when he'll spit that if he'd known how it would all turn out he would have walked away without so much as a backward glance.

This will be a lie.)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A (mostly) unprompted piece inspired by the previous chapter.

Like everyone, Jamie has his share of scars. 

For the most part they're unremarkable: here a souvenir of a childhood fall from a tree, there an old burn from student adventures in drunk cooking. He has two major scars though, and they have three things in common. Firstly, they were both acquired in the same place, under essentially the same circumstances. Secondly, they're both reminders of what you might call major turning points in his life...though that's only really obvious in hindsight.

Thirdly, they're both inextricably tied up with Malcolm.

One is more a cluster of scars than a single one, jagged and ugly and roughly arranged in a distorted circle on his right forearm. It's common knowledge around the press office, that one, and thereby the whole of Westminster. He tends to end up with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows by the end of a long day, particularly in the summer months - London is _fucking_ hot - and it's hardly easy to miss, even faded as it is by long decades.

A few brave souls have asked about it, from time to time. The answer tends to depend on his mood, and on who's doing the asking. Some are told in creatively obscene terms to mind their own fucking business. Others get some ridiculous and patently untrue fabricated story. Most, in the end, get a shrug and a laconic _barfight_.

It's a nice wee rumour, and it hardly hurts his image as Malcolm's psychopathic sidekick. It's true enough as far as it goes. The part he leaves out is that he was a bouncer, not a combatant, and he'd picked the wound up in the course of breaking up the barfight in question.

Glassed in a barfight. How fucking stereotypically Glaswegian. He'd got lucky though, catching it on his forearm. If his reflexes had been a second slower it would have been his fucking face.

Occasionally, if he feels like a bit of mischief, he'll even mention that Malcolm was also involved in the barfight in question. He leaves the specifics purposefully vague, and it's hardly _his_ fault if people assume something other than the reality. Which is that Malcolm wasn't an _active_ participant so much as 'off his tits on eccies and getting the shit kicked out of him', and that Jamie might never have given him a second glance if they hadn't washed up in A &E together.

But they did. And it was the start of something, something neither of them were in any way expecting or prepared for.

The scar is livid on his bared arm the day he walks out on the press office, after Tom's coronation, after the fight has turned ugly and personal. Jamie's resignation letter sits like a declaration of war on the table between them, meticulously correct and malevolently civil and signed _James A MacDonald_ at the bottom with a defiant flourish. It'll be torn in half and the crumpled remains tossed in the rough direction of the bin before the end. It doesn't matter. There's a second copy tucked into an envelope with an explanatory post-it note in Sam's in-tray.

 _I should have walked away there and then and never looked fucking back_ , Malcolm spits in the furious heat of the moment, and it hits home like none of the objectively harsher insults had. _Fuck you,_ Jamie snarls back, _I'd bled for you before I even knew your fucking name, and I've got nothing back, fucking nothing_. It's not true, but it feels it at the time, and from the narrowing of eyes and fresh flush of anger across the table he knows it's stung like it was meant to.

The thing is, the shouting and swearing and creatively obscene threats have never meant anything to them. They're tools to be used against lesser mortals, the foundation stone of their particular brand of political terrorism. The words that do real damage between them have always been the simple, the straightforward, the viciously unadorned.

The last thing he says to Malcolm, hissed across the table with brutal, venomous honesty before he turns and storms out of the office, is _I would have given you everything I fucking had, if you'd ever had the balls to ask._

After that, they don't exchange a word for months.

But the thing is, there's the other scar.

The other scar is another relic of diving into the middle of a nasty little barfight. Except that time Kat was a baby and he was trying to juggle uni and a job and a wife and a wean and he hadn't had a decent night's sleep or enough to eat in _weeks_ , and...well, maybe it was complacency. Maybe it was just being that bit too tired to function at a hundred percent. Whatever the reason, that time his reflexes were that second slower. That time--

Well, he hates to be melodramatic, but he nearly fucking died. 

Twenty-five years on he still remembers with absolute clarity the way the strobes had gleamed on the blood seeping between his fingers, trickling down his wrists, pooling beneath him on his knees on the sticky floor of the club. The way the thrumming bass from the speakers was drowned out by the white noise swelling in his ears as all the strength flowed out of him and his vision went grey around the edges. He remembers losing consciousness in the cold certainty of never waking up.

It's Malcolm who's there when he comes to in hospital (Jean's outside, shushing a wailing Kat, who hadn't taken at all well to seeing her da pale and still and silent in a nest of IV tubes). It's Malcolm, he _knows_ even though the bastard denies it to this day, who put in a bit of bribery here and a bit of blackmail there and got him the offer of the job at the _Herald_ , which paid a lot better and involved no belligerent drunks at all (well, unless you counted their editor).

It's that scar, and everything it represents, that has his thumb hesitating over _delete_ when Malcolm texts him out of the blue six months later. Has him muttering _fuck it_ under his breath and tapping out a terse reply. And slowly the texts resume, and then the emails, and the occasional 4am phone calls, until out of nowhere it's back to how it's always been like they were never parted.

And maybe it's that scar, and the other one too, that linger at the back of his mind when the word _perjury_ is splashed all over the news and he packs up his arsenal and goes to war for Malcolm one last time.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For scottishwolves, who wanted an outside POV on Malcolm and Jamie. It, er-- wandered off on me a little. I'm sorry. I don't know why this keeps happening.
> 
> Featuring the triumphant return of Kat MacDonald, now (sort of) all grown up.

Kat MacDonald has absolutely no intention of attending King's College London, but she goes to the open day anyway.

It's an iron-clad excuse to take a day or two off school, for one thing, and no seventeen-year-old in their right mind is going to turn that down. She's got a letter from her guidance teacher and everything. And if she gets to doss about London with her dad for a couple of days into the bargain, so much the better.

Ellie's really pissed off about it too (which isn't the best bit, except it kind of is), stuck at school in the run up to her standard grades while Kat gets to fuck off to London and see their dad. She's even (okay, maybe this is the best bit) managed to convince her mum that she can go down alone. Dad's going to pick her up at the station, she'd argued, and surely at seventeen-going-on-eighteen she could be trusted to sit on a train successfully without in some way fucking it up? 

She might not have phrased it exactly like that. Her mum's a lot pickier about swearing as punctuation than her dad is.

However her argument was phrased though, it was a successful one, and seven am finds her far too bright and cheery for the ungodly hour and the amount of sleep she hasn't had on the ride down, trying not to bounce in her seat with excitement like a wean as the her train pulls into Euston. She's packed light, not much in her backpack besides a couple of changes of clothes and a few other miscellaneous odds and ends. She must make an odd contrast to the herds of weary grey commuters, ponytail flying behind her as she bounces along the platform with boundless energy.

Her dad's waiting for her on the other side of the ticket barriers. She picks up speed over the last few yards and crashes eagerly into a rib-cracking hug.

It's a rare enough opportunity. Her dad'd come up to Glasgow a fair bit, especially when her and Ellie were tiny, but it wasn't all that often she got to come down to London. What with school and money, and the train journey being frankly a complete pain in the arse.

They both know she's not going to King's College, but he trails round the campus open day with her anyway, keeping up a running sarcastic commentary on events. Most of it's harmless enough, and she doesn't have much trouble keeping a straight face, but she has to muffle her laughter in her sleeve when they pass the Young Conservative Student Society's stall.

It's later - after lunch, after the tours and the talks and the seventeen dozen random leaflets - on one last round of the student society stalls that her eye catches on the brightly coloured banner adorning the LGBT Society's stall. She doesn't realise she's staring until an older girl with candyfloss-pink hair and a broad, friendly smile waves at her. She flushes and ducks her head and turns away.

When she glances up, her dad's giving her an odd look.

The moment passes quickly enough, but there's an odd sort of tension in the air thereafter, and before too long Kat's paranoia starts getting the better of her. It peaks when they're on their way away from the campus again, and her dad gives her an uncharacteristically serious look, sighs, and begins, "Listen, Kat-"

"I think I like girls," she blurts.

Well fuck. When she'd planned this conversation out in her head, imaginary Kat was a lot more articulate than that. And oh god, it's out there now, and _none_ of her friends have done well with this. Laura McTavish's gran still won't speak to her. Ally Sheeran's lot threw him out. And she knows that, generally well hidden though they may be, her dad does have occasional religious tendencies--

"Oh, love," he says, and pulls her into a hug.

Some people can cry with dignity. Kat is not one of them. You want some inelegant blubbering, she's your girl. She clings to her dad's jacket and buries her face in his shoulder, not even a hundred percent sure why she's sobbing like a wean with a skint knee.

"It's alright, love," he's saying, "I don't care if you're bringin' lassies home." He pauses and gives this statement some consideration. "As long as she's no' a hun. Or a fucking Tory."

Kat gives a weak hiccup of a laugh.

"I wasn't sure if..." she says, scrubbing a damp sleeve over her eyes, and trails off. She's not enirely sure where that sentence was really meant to be going.

He shrugs. "Aye, well, I can hardly talk." She stares for a moment with furrowed brow before deciding that no, she might actually be better off just not questioning that one.

After that it's a quiet sort of evening. They get takeaway and watch random episodes of Red Dwarf on Dave, and Kat shares choice snippets of gossip about her aunts and uncles (which are accepted with a gleeful malevolence that promises to make the next family gathering an adventure). It's nice.

The next morning she wakes up in a nest of blankets in the spare room to the sounds of clattering dishes and something gloriously unhealthy sizzling nearby. The air carries a tantalising promise of bacon. It's the sound of what might be conversation from the kitchen, though, that has her sitting up and squinting in sleepy puzzlement and ultimately getting out of bed.

Heading through to the kitchen answers two questions. Firstly and most importantly, yes, that was most definitely bacon she could smell. Secondly, she was actually hearing half of a conversation. As she wanders in through the open door, yawning, her dad - coffee in one hand, frying pan in the other, phone jammed precariously between shoulder and ear - is mid-argument with whoever's on the other end of the phone line. She's mildly impressed by the level of multitasking on display.

"-I don't care if they've started World War Three, I've got the day off," he's saying, gesturing distractedly with a chipped coffee mug. "Take it up wi' the fuckin' HR Borg if you like, but I've got around four an' a half thousand fucking owed vaction days I never get to take 'cause you're a slavedriving old bastard, an' we work for a shower of complete fucking incompetents. Morning, love. Sleep well?"

She nods and settles into a chair at the kitchen table, staring in mute fascination as he rolls his eyes to heaven and assures whoever's on the phone that no, of course he's not fucking talking to them.

"I'll just- look, just fucking email me it, okay? I'll have a look. No promises though. I'm fucking busy." Whatever the response is provokes a long-suffering sigh, but it's accompanied by a hint of a smile. "Aye, you too. Cunt."

"Who was that?" Kat asks as he tosses the phone aside in favour of concentrating on the bacon.

"Malcolm," he replies. Kat, who's known the man in question as 'Uncle Malc' since she was about three years old, accepts this without any further comment. But her mind's lingering on that soft, half-hidden smile. On the reflexive _aye, you too_ she knows as the response to ending countless phone calls with _love you, dad_.

She's still half-asleep though, and the arrival of a fried breakfast promptly pushes everything else from her mind.

"What time's your train home?" he asks, midway through demolishing his own breakfast.

"Not til eight at night," she replies.

"Alright." Pause for coffee."You mind if we swing by the office? Just for ten minutes, I need to pick something up."

"Aye, no problem."

Despite - of perhaps because of - repeated exposure from an early age, Kat has never been remotely tempted to consider going into politics. Her experiences have left her with the impression that the world of politics is composed of roughly equal parts unnecessary arguments and outright lies. She'd rather do something a bit more useful with her life.

The Number 10 press office - a place she is not really supposed to be, but for _some_ reason the security had thought better of it when asked to clarify his objection to her presence - does nothing but reinforce the impression. She parks herself off to one side of the ongoing chaos while her dad goes off to have an argument or several. Apparently this is a vital part of the political process.

She draws a great many stares and whispers, she can't help but notice. One brave soul even attempts to _talk_ to her, only to be summoned away by a bellowed threat from across the room. (Shortly thereafter, a very nice lady who introduces herself as Sam offers her a cup of tea and chats to her for a little. This, apparently, is more acceptable.)

It's entertaining, in a bizarre sort of way. Eventually the chaos subsides a little and her dad pries Uncle Malc away from work long enough to go for some lunch, and Kat...watches.

She's been wondering, you see, about that phone call earlier. Now that she's awake enough to actually expend some brainpower on it. She's not a wee kid any more, and, well...to be honest, she's wondered about this sort of thing from time to time. She's long since come to terms with the idea of having a step-dad - Gary's alright really, and he makes her mum happy when they're not driving each other mental - but there's never been even the slightest hint of a potential step-mum on the horizon. When she was younger she'd kind of assumed - and she's not saying she was _wrong_ , just that maybe there's more to it than that - that her dad just didn't have much of a life outside of work.

So she watches, and now that she's looking for them, she's picking up on little things. Things most people wouldn't think twice about, really. A hint of warmth taking the sting from an insult. Tiny, thoughtless touches in passing to the arm or back. Maybe she's only seeing it because the thought's in her head now, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

"You can hardly talk, eh?" she says, apropos of nothing, on the way home. From the sideways glance she gets in return she can tell that he knows exactly what she means.

"Aye, well." He shrugs. "Let's just say you're in no danger of gettin' a step-mum any time soon."

She nods, considers her trainers. "I won't say anythin' to mum."

"Me neither."

They both keep their respective promises. Not all that much time later, his will become unnecessary when Kat - now twenty years old and in her second year at Edinburgh University - brings her girlfriend home for Christmas. But she keeps hers when, scant months later, his Westminster career goes down in flames. And she never - _never_ , no matter how much she might want to - asks for anything other than the official story.

(She never asks, and that's why she's the only one who ever gets it)


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More pirate AU, by popular demand

It was brutally cold in the cell. The lone stove was a pitiful thing, laughably inadequate beside the bare stone sucking all warmth from the air; even the lone guard was huddled close to it, a threadbare blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Malcolm, in the cell at the far end of the row, didn’t really stand much chance.

He curled in on himself, breath steaming in the chill air, and tucked his hands into what was left of his jacket. The manacles had left raw red welts around his wrists, the sting when he moved muted by a creeping numbness. Really, the cold was the least of his troubles right now. He heard it was a relatively painless way to go. Almost peaceful, as these things went. Certainly a sight better than being hanged at dawn.

It was a fact of life that sooner or later one had to accept, when in the profession of piracy. Everyone got caught out eventually. Maybe it would be battle, maybe it would be mutiny - and Malcolm had weathered both in his time, from both sides - or maybe it would be the noose. As the silent nighttime hours slipped away toward morning, he was faced with the inexorable reality of the last.

So that was that. He’d accepted the possibility a long time ago. If he was determined of one thing, it was that he was going to go out with some fucking dignity.

There’s a commotion out by the guardroom, just out of sight from the awkward angle of his cell; the sounds of an argument drawing closer. There’s a sharp upswing in volume that must be the door opening, and then— his heart about fucking stops.

No. It can’t be. He can’t fucking let himself hope, not even for a second, not when there isn’t a snowball’s chance in fucking hell. It’s just a familiar accent throwing up certain associations in his mind. There’s not a chance the voice he’s hearing can possibly belong to who part of him desperately wants it to.

"He’s already refused to see one priest, father, I don’t think—"

"I’m not asking you to think, son." Stern, strident, and _fuck_ there’s no mistaking that voice. He must be losing his mind. This is a fucking hallucination. “If there’s any chance of salvation for this lost soul, it is our solemn duty to help him find his way back to the Lord in his last hours.”

The other voice - he’s got it pegged now as the commander of the garrison here - subsides into disgruntled muttering. 

"Thank you, Commander, that will be all."

"Father! We can’t possibly leave you alone with a dangerous criminal."

"The hand of God will protect me." Suddenly there’s a dangerous edge of thunderous fire and brimstone that he knows all too well. "I should look to your own soul if I were you, Commander, if you presume to question the divine will in this matter."

The argument continues briefly, the commander putting up a spirited but ultimately doomed defense, before he and the guardsman are summarily ejected from the cells. There’s a moment of silence, punctuated by footsteps on the damp flagstones, and Malcolm all but stops breathing.

He can’t fucking believe it. It’s been years, _years_ since that ugly little scuffle for the captaincy with Tom, and the fights and recriminations and quiet desertions which had followed. Years and somehow the malevolent little shit hasn’t aged a fucking day, still all boyish features and impossibly blue eyes like the day Malcolm first met him, flecked with his own blood in the dust of a ruined town.

"They can hang you for impersonating a priest, you know," Malcolm says.

Jamie tugs at his collar and scowls. “Fuck you, I am a priest. Or I was, anyway, until some absolute bastard wrecked my mission and fucking kidnapped me.”

"Come to give me my last rites, eh? Redeem my black little soul?"

"Fat chance. Your soul’s beyond fucking help." Jamie gives a sharp, vicious grin. "I mean I could if that’s what you want, but personally I was thinking of something a bit more like…" With an expression of infinite smugness he produces a heavy iron key that the light-fingered little bastard’s clearly lifted from the unfortunate guardsman.

It’s too good to be fucking true. Which is exactly why Malcolm hangs back, suspicious, stubborn is his refusal to believe that it can possibly be this simple. “Why are you fucking here?”

The look Jamie gives him is tired. “Does it matter?”

Malcolm turns this over in his mind. Considers it from several different angles. “…yes.”

Jamie rolls his eyes, jams the key in the lock, and yanks open the barred door of the cell. “Well in that case, you can interrogate me about it at your fucking leisure once we’re out of here in one piece. There’s a ship waiting, captain owes me a favour, but we’ll need to get there without being seen or they’ll hold everything in the harbour.”

"What about those two fucking idiots you kicked out? Are they no’ lurking around outside?"

"Don’t fucking worry, I’ll take care of that." He pulls two small, wicked knives from inside the depths of his cassock. Malcolm is mildly horrified, but mostly impressed.

"Let’s fucking move then," Jamie says, jerking his head impatiently in the direction of the door. "Keep low, keep quiet, and don’t fuck this up. If I get fucking shot for you, I’m going to flay you alive inch by fucking inch and turn your skin into a fucking raincoat." 

Malcolm snorted. “What happened to ‘the hand of God will protect me’?”

"Aye, well…the Lord helps those who help themselves."


End file.
